Spain, Feb. 2013: The work of Núria Güell is a striking example of the potentially fruitful and functional relationship between art and activism. Her projects and performances tackle the injustices of established institutions head-on; they question enforced norms, search for strategies of dissent and suggest alternative models to those of our present neo-liberal capitalist society.

During the week of the 13th-17th February, Güell’s work will be juxtaposed against the setting in which it finds itself: ARCOmadrid 2013, one of Spain’s biggest commercial art fairs. With Barcelona-based ADN Galeria, the pieces displayed will include Humanitarian Aid, Police Officers’ Contribution, Intervention # 1, and Displaced Moral Application # 1: Exponential Growth. Each of the pieces turn established practices and laws back on their enforcers in order to highlight the hypocrisy and inequality inherent in many of our systems.

I spoke with Güell about the concepts informing her vision and technique and her upcoming exhibition in Madrid.

Clare Sheppard: Do you see art as a kind of civil-disobedience, as a medium to achieve an ethical-political end? Or, are you also looking to achieve the perfection of some specific artistic forms?

Núria Güell: I do not see art as a type of civil disobedience. When I use it, it is only a significant resource toward the objective of the project in question. I see art as an exercise in thought that allows me to understand, in its complexity and at both a socio-economic level and at a subjective level, the historical moment in which I live. For this reason I think that art has to respond to the coordinates of the moments in which we are living, and right now the level of violence we are submerged in, which comes as a result of neoliberal capitalism, is unfortunately very high. Therefore, for me, art cannot be amenable.

However, yes, in this “emergency” situation, I opt for substituting aesthetic ends with ethical ones.

I would not wish to talk of a desire toward perfectionism. I simply broaden the limits to suit my size so that I can achieve, through art, what I consider to be opportune. In much of my work there is a revision of the practices used by other artists, but applied in a way which expresses reality and not worked on according to the classical representation which characterises Art.

CS: You went to Cuba because of the malaise of the artistic establishment in Spain, and were admitted to the Behaviour Art School run by Tania Bruguera. What were the most significant moments during your stint in Cuba?

NG: In Cuba I basically worked and studied a lot. I think that my time in Cuba is still with me and will continue to be. You cannot understand my current practices without taking into account my participation in Tania Bruguera’s Behaviour Art Department, where she, with her rigour, thoroughness, and dedication, forced me to define my position in my practice within the framework of coherence and compromise. Moreover, the department did not just consist of Tania; it was made up of all of the artists who shared some weeks with us, like Fernando Sanchez Castillo or Miguel Calderon, and above all our Cuban artist classmates with whom we shared our day to day lives and our projects.

CS: One of your most interesting and attractive projects was your collaboration with the famous robber El Solitario. How did this idea come to you? Could you briefly describe the project, and its results?

NG: In 2009 when I came back from Cuba and established myself in Spain again, everyone was talking about the recession. Still feeling unsettled I took it upon myself to study monetary politics in order to understand what had happened. Out of this came two projects on banking ethics and one of them is Displaced Moral Application # 1: Exponential Growth in which El Solitario participated. In this project, which was brought about with the collaboration of the Cuban artist, Levi Orta, we asked the bank robber Jaime Gimenez Arbe, alias El Solitario, to design a plan to rob a bank from the high-security prison in which he was incarcerated. Jaime drafted a novel describing strategies to expropriate a bank. The first chapter of the novel, which contains various methods, was sold at an art auction and the documents and the money obtained from the project went to El Solitario. Meanwhile, the plan was protected in a security safe rented in a branch of the same bank targeted to be robbed. We adopted the concept of the ethics applied in most banks as our basis. What is important for these banks is to generate profits whilst themselves avoiding the social damage this may entail, a principle which emerges from the Monetary System’s dependency on perpetual accelerated growth. The project generated a potential value, a strategy which alludes to the concept of speculation and inflation and forms the main nucleus of financial activity and the art business.

CS: Could you describe the projects that you are going to exhibit at ARCOmadrid? What do you want to get from this exhibition?

NG: The exhibition is within the context of ARCO, a commercial fair. Therefore, what I can hope for is to sell some work in order to continue financing my projects and perhaps, also the fair could offer me some visibility in the international context.

Apart from the project of El Solitario I will also exhibit Police Officers’ Contribution, developed in Cuba and Intervention # 1 which I made a short time ago in Spain. In the former what I did was to elicit police agents to be unbecomingly flirty with me in the street, at the inauguration of an exhibition. The strategy to bring them to the gallery was based on flirting, taking advantage of all of the occasions on which they told me things in order that I would follow them or to exchange telephone numbers. Every one of these meetings and calls I covertly documented in order to have them later at the exhibition. My response to their proposals for intimate meetings was to agree to meet. However, the time and place I suggested was at the opening of the exhibition where the documentation of each encounter with them was displayed using the "police inquiry" technique. My answer to their propositions to have intimate meetings were to realize them at the inauguration, thereby facilitating the meeting of the police with the “police inquiry” throughout which, without knowing their it, they had been the target.

In Humanitarian Aid I offered myself as a wife to any Cuban who wanted to emigrate from Cuba to Spain, paying for the cost of the wedding and the travel expenses. I asked those who were interested to write me “the most beautiful love letter in the world”; a jury made up of three jineteras (prostitutes for foreigners) selected the winning letter and, therefore, my future husband. The winner had to agree to be available to me for the duration of the time it took to legalise him in Spain, at all times that I needed him for different requests. He currently has his Spanish residency and in a short time we will divorce. Should the project be sold we will equally share the profits from it.

In Intervention # 1 I created a cooperative under which I contracted a construction worker who had been evicted. The objective of the contract was to remove the entrance doors to empty buildings that CAM (Mediterranean Savings Bank) had acquired at auction after evicting families who lived there. The process of hiring of the worker was done through a legal entity, in order to guarantee his impunity. This is the strategy that banks use to circumvent the Ley de Enjuiciamiento Civil (Civil Indictment Act) with impunity and purchase evicted properties for 50% of their valuation. Through this procedure, houses become accessible for public use.

CS: According to critics of Humanitarian Aid, despite intentions of denouncing the injustices of an oppressive system, the project consists of a privileged person, who comes from a free country, and who makes individuals who do not have options compete with each other. Is there an inescapable moral ambivalence in this type of project, as requisite as the project was?

NG: I decided to do this project after having lived in Cuba. Day to day there were many Cubans who, upon seeing my pale self and quickly detecting that I came from a developed country (I do not agree with your above description of my country as being free, but this is a topic for another day), they came close to me trying to win me over; as everyone knows marriage is the most sure way of emigrating from Cuba and in order to live legally in Spain without being persecuted by the police or incarcerated in a Detention Centre for Foreigners. Therefore, the operation of the project consisted in asking of them to do what they habitually do, but through the written word.

Yes, it is certain that I worked from a privileged position, a position awarded to me by my nationality, and I did this project and indeed all of my projects, conscious of that fact. The role of first-class citizens and second-class citizens, which the Cuban government applies through various methods, is wretchedly overwhelming in some sectors of daily life in Havana. What seemed more honest was to work accepting this reality, accepting that what is real does not mean legitimising it, and what would have been immoral, it seems to me, would have been to have worked omitting this condition; when Spaniards who go to Cuba in search of sex tourism they are supported by the power awarded by their nationality and their economic position, to satiate their need for gratification and reaffirm their superior position, forcing the outside interest to disguise itself as love. The project does not solely speak of Cuba; it also addresses us, the “first world”, “Humanitarian Aid.”

CS: Your performances all share an ethical, subversive character with respect to current rules and laws (e.g. laws for foreigners, banking law). However, what alternative forms of subjectivity and community do you propose?

NG: Implicitly, to disobey laws which one does not consider to be just and transgress the dominant moral when it holds you, limits you and oppresses you, is to gamble with a subjectivity in which individual morals prevail in order for each person to be above the law and social conventions imposed by the hegemonic order. On a community level, for example, in the manual that I made on how to expropriate money from banking entities there is a chapter which was written by activists from Colectivo Crisis. The chapter tells of how to live on the margin, or at least how to stop being an accomplice to the capitalist system, while at once, recuperating solidarity, cooperation, exchange, time banks.

CS: What are your upcoming projects?

NG: I prefer not to talk about them until they are finished in order to be sure to be able to carry them out as I had planned.